Hybrid Solar Eclipse of 2005 April 08

Fred Espenak, NASA's GSFC

On Friday, 2005 April 08, a hybrid1 eclipse of the Sun will be visible from within a narrow corridor which traverses the far Southern Hemisphere. The path of the Moon's shadow begins southeast of New Zealand and stretches across the Pacific Ocean to Panama, Colombia and Venezuela. A partial eclipse will be seen within the much broader path of the Moon's penumbral shadow, which includes New Zealand, much of the South Pacific, South and North America.

The path of this event begins as an annular eclipse but it changes to total about 2200 km south of Tahiti.
At maximum eclipse (UT), the duration of totality is 45 seconds.
Unfortunately, the total portion of the track never crosses land.
The path becomes annular again about 800 km west of Costa Rica.
By the time the shadow reaches the coast of Costa Rica, the annular phase will already be 12 seconds and growing.
After crossing Panama and Colombia, the central path ends in Venezuela where a 33 second annular eclipse will occur at sunset.

The article Eclipses During 2005 (from RASC Observer's Handbook 2005) has a more detailed description of the eclipse path.

This eclipse will be visible as a partial eclipse from the southern USA.
A special web page 2005 Partial Eclipse in the USA gives full details, time and diagrams of the eclipse as seen from over a hundred cities there.

This web site has been established for the purpose of providing detailed predictions, maps, figures and information about this important event.
Additional and supplemental material for the 2005 hybrid eclipse will be published here in the coming months.

1A hybrid eclipse is a unique type of central eclipse where parts of the path are annular while other parts are total.
This duality comes about when the vertex of the Moon's umbral shadow pierces Earth's surface at some points, but falls short of the planet along other portions of the eclipse path.
The curvature of Earth's surface brings some geographic locations along the path into the umbra while other positions are more distant and enter the antumbral rather than umbral shadow.
In most cases (like in 2005), the hybrid eclipse begins annular, changes to total for the central portion of the path, and then converts back to annular towards the end of the path.
However, some hybrid eclipses may be annular only at the beginning (e.g. - 2013 Nov 03) or at the end (e.g. - 2386 Apr 29) of the path.

Description of Eclipse Maps and Tables

The following links give detailed descriptions and explanations of the eclipse maps, tables and predictions.

General Maps of the Eclipse Path

The following maps show the overall regions of visibility of the partial eclipse as well as the path of the central eclipse through the Pacific Ocean and South America.
They use high resolution coastline data from the World Data Base II (WDB).

Each map is available in two resolutions: 'Low' (web resolution) and 'High' (300 dpi print resolution). You may need to set your printer to 25% reduction in order to print 'High' resolution figures on a single page.

Eclipses Elements, Shadow Contacts and Path of Totality

The following tables give detailed predictions including the Besselian Elements, shadow contacts with Earth, path of the umbral shadow and topocentric data (with path corrections) along the path.
Also included are special extended version tables of path coordinates and graze zones in formats convenient for plotting on maps.

Lunar Limb Profile

The following figures give show the
Lunar Limb Profile (via Watts datum) for two points along the central line.
Figure 1 gives the profile at the instant of greatest eclipse (20:35:46 UT).
Figure 2 gives the profile at 22:12 UT when the eclipse will be annular in Panama.
The
limb profile can be used to calculate corrections to the contact times or to determine the
graze zones at the northern and southern limits of the umbral or antumbral path (Table 8).

Saros 129

The hybrid eclipse of 2005 Apr 08 is is the 51st eclipse of Saros series 129.
The series began with 20 partial eclipses, the first of which was on 1103 Oct 03.
The first annular eclipse occurred on 1464 May 06.
The series continued to produce annular eclipses until the hybrid eclipse of 1987 Mar 29.
Another hybrid will occur on 2023 Apr 20.
The following 9 events will all be total eclipses.
The series ends with 19 partial eclipse, the last of which occurs on 2528 Feb 21.
Complete details for Saros 129 may be found at: